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The Citigroup Global TMT Conference 2024

Sep 4, 2024

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

All right, thanks everyone for joining. Back again, Yigal Arounian and on the Citi Internet team. Thanks for joining us here at the conference. Got the pleasure of being with Wix CFO, Lior Shemesh, and IR, Emily Liu, right?

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

Yeah.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yep.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Thanks for being on with us today. We'll have some mics going around later if anyone has any questions. So we'll get to that. But Lior, I want to start with Wix Studio. Probably not a surprise, last year, when you guys were here, it was just rolling out, it wasn't even out in GA yet. It's been a pretty successful year by, you know, most measures for Wix Studio. But maybe just to start there, you know, anything over the last year that's surprised you, that's been, you know, better than expected, worse than expected?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... or kind of how to think about the trajectory from here on Wix Studio?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yeah, I mean, I believe that, you know, this is, like, the most important question. Definitely better than expected. You know, I believe that, that after, you know, a year or less than a year, I'm certain that, you know, the Wix Studio is, a significant growth driver for us. It's a significant growth driver because, it's opened for us the entire partners market. I mean, we already started to see the numbers. It's already started to become, you know, as, more and more significant, and let me, try to explain, you know, the reasons why. So first of all, it was, the best ever, product launch that we ever had. In a very short period of time, we have more than, one million users.

It keeps on growing by hundreds of thousands, you know, every quarter. So definitely, you know, I'm not familiar with many products that, you know, after less than a year already passed, you know, more than one million users. And those users are coming from all types of professionals and agencies. Some of them, you know, medium size, small size, like three, four, five employees, 10 employees, and some of them, you know, big agencies. And the feedback that we are getting, and this is, like, the most important thing, is amazing. Because for the first time, they have, like, a full platform. It's not a product, it's a full platform that has, like, you know, a dashboard that they can manage their employees, looking at what they did, you know, in terms of the work.

They can manage roles and permissions. You know, think about an agency right now, you know, I build something, and I want to send it to the customer, okay? To review. But I don't want the customer, you know, to basically destroy everything that I created, so I can tell him, "Look, you can, you know, just edit the content, but not the design," for example. So there's nothing like that. They don't have to take care of, you know, the maintenance, the security, and so on. So definitely, the feedback that we are getting is amazing, and you know, last quarter, we said that in terms of the collection for people that using the Studio editor, it was growing by 20% on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Right.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

So it's like a hyper growth product for us. It's already, like, millions of dollars that generating revenue for us. So less than after one year, you know, we are feel very, very positive about, you know, the future, about partners, and the fact that, you know, Studio is, like, the most significant platform within the partners' strategy.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay, got it. So maybe to expand on some of those points, I think one of the misconceptions from people sometimes is, okay, now we're lapping Studio, we're a year in, but you're you're talking about it as a growth driver, to come. The partner segment is seeing 30% plus growth on a trailing 12-month basis.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Much of that is probably outside of Studio, but I want to-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... let you talk to that, right? If we're talking about Studio just not even being in GA at this time last year, what's the maybe what was the key driver of the partner growth before Studio kind of started to ramp, and how much of an impact it is, and-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... is it now? And as you think about the growth going forward, meaning you're not lapping that today, becomes a bigger impact over time, just what's the right way for people to think about all that?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

So yeah, I mean, definitely, you know, it's a SaaS model, meaning that until they go down to the revenue, it takes time. I think that, you know, from my point of view, and, you know, obviously, you don't have those numbers, but from my point of view, I'm looking at newcomers and what is the growth of newcomers using Studio, and this is a significant growth. Yes, you know, so in any other SaaS model, most of the revenue is coming from existing customers. So this is why the effect of Studio is not yet big or significant in terms of revenue.

It's more significant in term of bookings, meaning that if it will continue growing like that, definitely we are going to see acceleration in term of the growth for partners in the future, at least for bookings. And by the way, we already started to see that in the last quarter. The fact that bookings went up from 10 to 15 percent, a big one of the biggest reason for that, it was because of Studio. So it started to have its impact, but yet it's not like a fully... It's still kind of rolling into the revenue and bookings. Remember that also very interesting because, you know, we talk about a SaaS model, for example, when talking about self-creators. Yes, it's this is the case. It takes time until it's actually we see that in revenue and bookings.

But what we've seen, something really interesting with Studio, even existing partners from existing quotes using Studio to build more and more website, like the second, the third, the fourth, because Studio enabled them to use it for more and more projects because it has, like, much more capabilities. So we definitely see impact also on existing quotes rather than just on new quotes.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Okay. Let's talk about the capabilities first for a second here. Studio was sort of an evolution of multiple products, predecessor products, right?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yeah.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Editor X, the most recent before it. You know, it seems like it is the most kind of game-changing of, of-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... all these combined. What's next in terms of capabilities, you know, the product roadmap for Studio? Is it kind of built out the way you want it to be, or is there still a lot to come on that?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Well, so there are many, many things that we are going to launch. Look, it's only the beginning. We just launched the product. We talk with our partners, we understand what they are missing, what is, you know, from their point of view about the performance, what more features that we need to release. And this is exactly what we're doing, so it's just the beginning. Usually, you know, when we release the first version, there is second, third, and so on. So yeah, definitely. And by the way, also with the different AI capabilities and different AI services that we are going to launch. So there will be more integration with other platform. But like for one, for example, the one that we have with Figma, you know, which is...

This is like, you know, it was, like, a top request from partners and something that they were missing, and we see right now the usage of it, and it's amazing because they're using Figma integration and creating, you know, many, many websites using this integration. So you can expect, you know, for the product to evolve, to have much more integration with more professional tools, and definitely much more capabilities.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Right. Okay. Let's talk about the agency world a little bit more. I think for some people, sometimes it's a black box to a certain extent, right? On the self-creator side, you know, it's one person-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yes

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... one website, maybe, you know, two, whatever. Agencies can build a lot more than that.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yeah.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

And you've talked about larger... So smaller agencies, but also larger agencies, adapting this, too.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Where is the share coming from? I know, like, WordPress is part of it. Is it predominantly WordPress? And how penetrated are you in that, let's say an agency builds a hundred sites, how many are they building on Wix Studio right now?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

First of all, you know, there was, I think it was a report that I read, like, a few weeks ago. I don't remember the name of the report, but it was talking about the fact that, actually looking at WordPress, about 80% of the website built on WordPress been built by actually by small agencies, the one that are, like, up to 20 employees. Not talking about the mega agencies. Meaning that still, those small or to medium type of agencies, they're responsible for most of the website that actually built out there.

And when you look at the overall, you know, we said about more than one million users, and it's growing by hundreds of thousands. Those are most of the users, but actually those up to 10-20 people that using Wix to build website for their customers. Now, why you see a very big penetration, because it's very easy for them. You don't have like a... You know, when you change platform and you have, like, a mega agency with 200 employees, it's really hard because you need to train them on new, you know, platform. For those one, it's, you know, the early penetration is quite easy because they have, like, three or four or five employees. It's very easy for them to convert from WordPress to Wix, and this is exactly what we see.

So this is, you know, one chunk of the agencies that we see, like, a big penetration for us. Actually, we see the strength of the brand. We're looking at the search for Studio right now on Google, and it's increasing dramatically, meaning that people already started to realize that, you know, Studio is the best platform for them rather than use, you know, WordPress. It's very easy for them also to convert existing website to Wix from WordPress. I think that the fact that right now we see the WordPress, the entire WordPress ecosystem shrinking, is a result of that, meaning that we are gaining more and more and more market share.

Now, when it come to the big agencies, like the mega agencies, we have a few that we already start to work with, but it takes time because you need to train them. It's not easy for them to convert. We might, you know, provide them with more tools in the future with based on AI to help them with this conversion. But basically, they need to change a platform, they need to train their employees. It takes time, and we started to see that happening, but it's not significant in terms of the revenue because it's something that it's a process. It takes time until it's actually started to happen.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay, and mega agencies means, like, agency at a holding company level?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Take, for example, Tata. From my point of view, it's a huge factory. It's a mega agency-

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

... so they started to use Wix, right? Tata, for example, you know, can build thousands of websites in a year. This is what I call mega agencies.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Right.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Let's remember, most of the website is actually built by the small one, not by the big one.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Right. Okay, got it. Let's shift to talk about AI or I guess partially shift, so AI has components on the agency side with Creator, and then with Studio, and then it's got components on the self-creator side as well. One of the big AI, GenAI focuses right now is around the business assistance.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

You've got 17 that are launching, right?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Yes.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

You've got more to come. I don't know. I'll leave it up to you to a certain extent, but can you talk about the difference between the AI features and functionalities for the professional side and the self-creator side? Is it the same thing? Are people looking for different things, and do you have different tools for each of them?

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I can, I can talk to that. I mean, in general, we have a really comprehensive suite of AI products, the cornerstone being our AI Website Builder, and that is more geared towards Self-Creators. When they come in and start building on Wix, when they enter our funnel, a majority of new users today use AI Website Builder. So that's our cornerstone AI product for this kind of group, this cohort of users. It builds out a fully functional, ready-to-publish website with inner pages, landing pages, verticals attached, applications attached, all ready to go and ready to publish. So that's been really compelling for this, and we've seen conversion and ARPU uplift, just from this product, in our new user cohorts.

And then for all of the other products that we have out there, we have a big suite of AI creation tools. We have specific e-commerce tools driven by AI. We have advertising and marketing tools that are also AI-driven. And these are, you know, kind of appeal to both self-creators and partners. Partners are also utilizing this. They use our text generation and layout generation tools to help them kind of have a... You know, they, they're not starting from scratch. They, it builds something for them. It's easy for them to edit and fine-tune, and it saves them a lot of time, so they've been really enjoying that.

That's, you know, these are the tools that are available on our classic editor, and then in our studio product, we have specific AI products there, and that's used primarily by professionals. So we have responsive AI layouting capabilities. We also have an AI Code Assistant, again, for those more sophisticated partners, and professional users. But in general, you know, we see that both kind of cohorts, these both types of users are utilizing AI to drive efficiency and help them build better products faster.

Great. That's great to hear. Let's on the self-creator side for a second, right? So, the bookings, they accelerated slightly in 2Q, were kind of in the mid-single digits. You talked about AI driving acceleration in bookings in the second half in the self-creator side. You also talked about the 10% target, 10% booking growth target, getting back to that, and AI driving that. So any way to kind of frame what the contribution has been in terms of the bookings growth so far? Is it early, like studio, or it's been more impactful so far?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

So your question was specifically about the Self-Creator?

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah, let's focus on Self-Creator for now.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Okay. So first of all, we see in the second quarter a significant increase in bookings for self-creators. It is not yet 10%, but not so far from that. But there are mostly three reasons for that, and I will talk about the fourth one because that will also enable us to be more than the 10% that you know that you mentioned before. Looking at what we call the blank creation or the new the newcomers to the self-creators and the fact that you are using you know the different AI tools, it's increased conversion significantly. But remember that when you start when you start the quarter, about 90% of the bookings coming from existing users. Okay? This is like a very kind of a healthy basic subscription model.

Let's assume that you increase conversion by 20%. So the impact on the 10%, it's only by, you know, 2% when you think about it, so it's very, very small. But the impact on the years to come, super significant. Okay? So when you're thinking about, you know, about AI, when it come to Self-Creators, there's a few opportunities. We didn't release all the tools and what you are planning, you know, to release, but I will talk about it, like, briefly. The first thing, you know, in terms of the opportunities for Self-Creators, is to increase the overall addressable market with different AI tools. Meaning that today, most of the Self-Creators, you know, they're coming to Wix because they are looking to build a website.

Actually, the search for Wix is much, much higher than the search for website builder because the brand is super strong. But the AI, without getting into too much details, will enable us in the future to bring also to increase kind of the top of the funnel, meaning to increase the addressable market for people that can come and use Wix. The second type of AI tools is the one that, for example, we just launched a few, a couple of quarters ago, the AI Site Builder. Well, this is, you know, the most of the important impact when someone come and start to use Wix, is to enable him, remember that it's a freemium model, to complete the website for his satisfaction.

So this is exactly what the AI Site Builder does, and it's helping you, you know, create a website fully designed with content, fully integrated into whatever you are looking for. It's actually asking you questions and also helping in term of the discoverability, because you're not always really understand what you need. Do you need? Okay, I have a business right now, do I need events? Do I need online store? What kind of capabilities do I need, for example, all kind of email marketing or how to boost my business? All those type of integration can be done through the AI, you know, questionnaire about, okay, you answer a question, I knew exactly in order what to offer you.

It means it's not just about completing the website, but also making it more successful in terms of how you operate the business. So this is something that we already started to see right now. The impact of it is obviously better conversion, but also higher output because of the discoverability, because I can offer you more services that you actually need, right? The third type of AI tools that we are going to launch is all kinds of services that can help you with the day-to-day business, okay? It can be financial decision, it can be marketing decision, okay? How I build it, how I use it after I become a premium. And this is something that you know probably we're going to charge more in terms of using it.

By the way, some of it will be, like, very plain vanilla, very easy, like a freemium model. Some of them will be more suitable for Self-Creators, some of them will be very sophisticated, more for partners. So I expect that those kind of three effect, you know, the, you know, increasing the addressable market, increasing conversion, and increasing the output, some of it already started to take effect. The other thing, you know, is obviously that has a big impact this quarter is the price increase. I know, looking at the price increase that we've made, compared to the last one that we've made, like, two or two and a half years ago, the result was different. Much, much better, meaning that we see that people were less sensitive to the price increase.

I think that, you know, when we started to learn and try to understand it, because we actually saw a different type of customers. Different type of customer, they are more mature, and they are more mature because of the partner strategy, meaning people that are coming with more GPV, more mature businesses, and so on, and obviously, they are less sensitive, you know, to the price increase. But it make us believe that we can actually use this strategy of price increase, you know, on an ongoing basis. Every two years, every two and a half years, obviously, every year we are going to A/B test it. The last effect on, you know, on self-creators is obviously the macro.

Those guys, don't be wrong, those guys are very sensitive to interest rate because they need to take loans and credit to invest in their business. Unless the interest rate go down, it always gonna be an issue. So I do. You know, it's not something that we can control, but I assume that once interest rate is going to be down, it will be extremely helpful for us to get behind, you know, more than the target of the 10% that you mentioned.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Okay, so we're talking about better conversion, better ARPU, 'cause you're attaching more products, and then just a general better ability to drive up price, 'cause you're driving more value for higher value customers.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Exactly.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

All right. Sounds pretty good.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

I agree.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay, another thing from this past quarter, really driven by all the things we're talking about here, is commerce on the platform. So you're kind of moving upmarket, and it's driving an ability for more commerce on your platform. Can you talk about-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... how that's changing with the evolution of the product?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm.

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

Yeah, so, you know, we kind of mentioned these. We're bringing on more partners, and these new partners, especially with Studio, and the new AI products that we're pushing out, they tend to be these larger agencies. These larger agencies, just by default, they tend. They have the tendency to be building more business sites, more commerce sites. Not just more commerce sites, but sites for larger businesses and more mature businesses, like Lior just mentioned.

With this new profile of these new merchants onboarding, you know, these merchants are coming onto Wix with, you know, more GPV already as a base. They're seeing more stable GPV base and stable GPV growth that is still growing quite robustly for them. They are also... You know, we see a lower level churn for them, too, just because, again, they're more mature. They have that lower, you know, lower rate of potential failure or closing the business, and that has, you know, benefited, you know, our churn numbers a good bit as well.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Mm-hmm.

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

So that's been really exciting. And, you know, when they have their GPV on our platform, this bigger base of GPV from the get-go, that's really when our product suite starts to show value. You know, we have a huge range of commerce tools that help them drive success. We have advertising and SEO and marketing tools for them as well. And we just have all of these other applications that help them grow their business, and in turn, their GPV on Wix grows, and we get, you know, what we call compounding growth from them. So, you know, we expect that to continue, especially as we continue roll out more commerce tools, more partnerships, more cross-selling abilities, a lot more capabilities in that realm.

You know, you've kind of seen it over the numbers over the past few years already. Partners today contribute to about 50% of our total GPV, and they're only about a third of our revenue base. So as more partners bring on these larger businesses with these large bases of GPV and more stable and more mature, that portion of GPV from partners should continue to grow.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. I wanna talk about the competitive environment for a second, 'cause you've continued to move upmarket. And I remember, really since I've been covering you guys, starting in 2018, that's been your strategy, to keep moving upmarket. We get questions often about where you fit in that landscape, and it sounds like you continue to move further up. Shopify, obviously, is one that comes up regularly. I won't call you guys enterprise yet. I don't know, maybe you do view yourself on the path towards that. But as you're moving up, is it still just WordPress? Do you compete more on the enterprise side? Like, how do we think about that?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Obviously, it's too early. I think that definitely, you know, Studio, with its capabilities, will enable us to compete more on enterprise. Because when you think about Studio, I mean, we build it obviously, you know, for our agencies. For example, take the fact that you can control content from one place, roles and permission, you know, perhaps multi-sites and so on. But it's exactly the same thing as, you know, enterprise looking for. You know, we see many cases where actually we see enterprises using Wix, not necessarily for their main website, but they can use Wix, for example, for marketing campaigns, all kind of landing pages where they can control the content from one place, from the corporate.

So we see a lot of use cases, not necessarily for the main website, but also for internal needs, for their employees and so on, for their customers. So definitely, I think that Studio, with its capabilities, will enable us to compete more on the, on enterprise, not necessarily for Shopify in term of, you know, online stores, but definitely for enterprises or big enterprises that's looking to use Wix for all kind of services. I think that in the future, we will be able to say exactly what are the niche or what are the places. We believe that enterprise will be much more relevant for Wix, but we already started to see that happening. We already started to see hundreds of enterprises using Wix.

I believe that Studio open, and, you know, it's a good question, but Studio open for us a market that it's not just the agencies, but also enterprises. By the way, when you think about it, it's connected to each other because some of the big agencies actually building a website and services, for example, for enterprises. You have marketing agencies that are using all kind of tools today to build, you know, capabilities for an enterprise that need their help in terms of, you know, doing campaigns. So, you know, obviously, they can use also, you know, Wix for that. We started to see that happening. It's too early to say, "Wow, is it going to be, like, a huge business for us?" But I truly believe that it's a huge market.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah. Okay, great. Let's go back to commerce for a second. And so GPV had a big quarter that was partially driven by an increase in the take rate. You talked about one new partner there. Can you expand on that and how we should think about adoption of Wix Payments and take rate over time?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Sure, so... Okay, so take rate, I believe that it will continue to increase. I mean, look, we understand the take rate cannot be 3%. The maximum can be 3%, obviously. But definitely, we want it to be more than 2%. How we do that? Right now, I think it's about 1.6%.

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

Six eight.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Six eight. How we do that? One is keep on integrating Wix Payments to more partners. The last one was with Square. It's a big partner that started to be, you know, integrated into Wix Payments, so it means that those people that using Square right now will be part of the Wix Payments, so it's increasing the take rate. So we already integrated with Stripe, with Adyen, and with Stone in Brazil, but there are also many local partners in many places of the world that we can integrate. So it's like the same, you know, strategy. It's not just about increasing partners to the Wix Payments platform, but also penetrating to more and more countries. There are still countries that Wix Payments is not available, for example, Israel.

It's mostly because of regulation, but it will change. Once you include a specific country and a specific partner, immediately, it's increased the take rate, and this is what we've seen in the last quarter. The other thing is about providing more product, that can help you increase take rate. For example, the last product that we included is the Wix Donations, which is part of Wix Payments. Right now, you can use the Wix platform to build the website for donation, and Wix Payments is part of it. Wix Proposals is a great example of how you move GPV from offline to online, and increasing the take rate. Because right now you can use Wix to send a proposal, meaning that you provide some kind of service.

You send a proposal using Wix to your customer, and it's immediately you can also charge money, advanced payment or the entire amount, okay, and this is all in Wix Payments. The other thing is about the Wix POS, right? POS is a great way, by the way. Shopify are doing the same thing, how you can move offline to online, but also increasing, you know, take rate. I think that Wix and Shopify are the only company that provides a full omni solution, online and offline together, including the POS, so this is the strategy. I believe that we see that continued. By doing that, it actually increased the take rate.

With regard to the overall GPV, we've seen that this quarter, what's happening this quarter is not just about the increase of take rate, but also increase of GPV as a result of the fact that we see a higher dollar per transaction for our users. And it's go back to what, you know, Emily spoke before about we see more mature businesses joining Wix with existing GPV in day one.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Okay. Let's now kind of boil this down to the financials. So, bookings was ahead of expectations in 2Q. Talked about the self-creator side driving some of that. Maybe, anything else to think about in that number? And then, I guess the bridge to the second half, where 16% in the second half coming out of the quarter, some debate around, whether there was a pull forward, that the high end of the full year guidance came down a little bit. There was some FX in there, and so I think some, I'll just call it general confusion on-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm-hmm

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

... how to think about, the second quarter results and what that means for the second half, and how to think about bookings going forward.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

So the second quarter results came exactly according to, you know, to my expectations. I think that the only thing that I was kind of surprised we got a budget from our most significant partners from Google for marketing. And it was like a few million dollars. Usually, it's happened in the second half of the year. It's happened in the second quarter. I don't know, perhaps they had extra budget, but in any case, without it, excluding that, the growth in the second quarter would have been 14%, not 15%. So sometimes you have this thing on booking that kind of, you know, fluctuating with the booking, but it is not significant.

So definitely, you know, when we provided the guidance, you know, in the previous quarter, we actually aimed for 16% in the second half of the year. It is still the case, even with this budget actually coming earlier in the second quarter. So besides that, there was no surprises. I believe that, you know, going up from 10% to 15% in the second quarter is a result of, many things. The first one we said, it's Studio, it's the AI initiatives, it's the overall e-com and the price increase. It's still going to happen, all of those reasons, all of these cases, all of those trends, still going to happen in the second half of the year, meaning nothing has changed. We actually feel much more comfortable about it.

I mean, we see the numbers, and it's exactly according to our expectations, with the fact that actually Studio is more impressive. But I believe that it will continue next year, and we feel very comfortable, you know, about the numbers. So there's really no change between the guidance that we provided last time, you know, to the actual result in the second quarter and the guidance for the second half of the year.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay. You feel good about the booking strength next year, even on the tougher comps as we worked our way through this year?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Look, there's always tough comps when it come to the price increase, you know, obviously.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Right.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

But also all the other reasons, we just started to see the impact of Studio and AI. I believe that they will compensate for that. But this is why, you know, when you're looking at the numbers of the AI initiatives and Studio, definitely its impact next year going to be, you know, larger.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Okay, any questions from the audience?

Shopify has come up a couple of times. Can you talk about how your overlap with them might increase over the next few years?

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Look, Shopify, it's a great company. We do not intend to compete with them on their most of the business. About 80% of the business coming from about 20 or 25% of the merchants. It's big chains, and probably Shopify, it's a better platform for them. You don't want to compete with a solution that it's really good, but I think that, you know, for some of their customers, yes, there is some kind of competition. Remember that people that come to Shopify are people that looking to build an online store, people that come to Wix looking to build a website. If you want to have, like, a much better design website with the e-com capabilities, probably Wix, it's a much better solution.

It doesn't mean that if you are running, like, $10 million of GPV. I mean, we have those kind of customers. Wix is not the best platform for you. But if you're looking for more kind of fulfillment capabilities, so yes, I mean, probably you will be using Shopify. But remember that we are going upscale, and I think that, you know, Yigal talked about it before. But take, for example, the fact that we had with you know an integration with companies that provide all those kind of fulfillment capabilities when, especially when you are selling from one country to the other. So yes, we are moving upscale, but also Shopify doing the same thing. I don't think that we'll ever compete kind of their main business.

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

I'll also say, too, you know, we're something that really differentiates our commerce platform is that it's very diversified. So actually, half of our GPV comes from non-store commerce service-selling merchants. And that's actually been the highest verticals. You know, we talked about bookings and events. These are two service-focused verticals that are growing 20-25% every quarter, and Shopify doesn't offer that.

Quick one. I was reading. Can you just talk about what you've done with price, just pricing? I guess you did a price increase last year-

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Mm

... and that went well. How do you feel, going forward, and how are you priced compared to some of the one or two key competitors already?

So yeah, I think that, you know, the result of the price increase was better than I expected. I think that it was also in the first quarter when we provided the guidance, we actually increased the guidance. Some of the reasons because of that, we see, you know, I mentioned before, we see more mature businesses. I mean, we've gone through a kind of evolution in terms of the type of customers that we are getting, so they were less sensitive to the price increase. We saw much better results than the previous one that we did, like, two and a half years ago. Definitely, we are going to A/B test every year, price increase.

It can be the case that we will decide to do price increase in one country, but not on the other. Remember, it's really different from one country to the other. We did increase pricing, but, for example, not in Brazil. So every country is different. We did increase pricing, but we didn't increase pricing for Studio, because we want to get more market share right now at this point of time. Definitely, we are going to test price increase, and we will decide. You know, we mentioned before, I believe that it will be a strategy that we are going to use on an ongoing basis.

[audio distortion] Roughly, how much did you raise the price?

It was somewhere between, depends, but somewhere between 10%-20%. Depends on the country, depends on the product.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

All right, that's our time. We didn't get to talk about margins or Rule of 40 somehow, so.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Ah, Rule of 40.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

I don't know if you have a closing remark on margins. Otherwise, the next conference you're at, make sure you start off with that.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Okay, no problem, but we said that we are significantly going to pass the Rule of 40 next year. Just, you know, just one sentence about it, I think that it will be a combination of better growth, but also driving better margins.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Got it. Great.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Thank you.

Ygal Arounian
Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Thanks for your time. Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Emily Liu
Head of Investor Relations, Wix

Thanks.

Lior Shemesh
CFO, Wix

Bye-bye.

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